Why its so easy to mock Americans.

last updated 8 January 2015

Germany

Claus Christian Malzahn

“Anti-Americanism is the wonder drug of German politics,” said Claus Christian Malzahn in Hamburg’s Der Spiegel. Any politician can kick up his poll numbers a few points by denouncing some American practice or other. It doesn’t matter what position we choose to oppose, we can always find Americans who embody it. They can be demonized as “too fat or too obsessed with exercise, too prudish or too pornographic, too religious or too nihilistic.” In foreign policy, they’re either “too isolationist” or “too imperialistic,” depending on the point we wish to make. We Germans simply ignore our own hypocrisy. We can spend the evening riveted to the latest episode of 24, and then “complain about Guantánamo the next morning.” It’s so easy because it is risk-free. We could never criticize, say, Iran with so much abandon. The last time we tried, with a skit on a comedy show portraying an ayatollah in women’s underwear, German diplomats were booted out of Iran and the comedian was made to apologize. “Jokes about fat Americans are just safer.”